Color wheels are widely used in display systems employing spatial light modulators, such as display systems using DMD®. To achieve high lumens and/or brightness, the color wheels often have white segments. With the ever increasing growth of lumens in projectors, the white segments have grown from being in the low 30° degrees range to the 120° degrees range today. This causes the white of the projection system to meet the desired lumens goals, but the secondary (e.g. cyan, yellow, and magenta) and the primary colors (e.g. read, green, and blue) actually get dimmer. Secondary colors suffer when the white is increased without a corresponding increase in their lumen output. This has been addressed through the addition of secondary color segments along with the white segments, but this typically is only one of the secondary colors that are added to the color wheel.
The color wheel systems also are being pushed to operate at higher color refresh rates in order to combat the color breakup problem. These higher color refresh rates further widens the gap between white and the other colors due to more spoke time (or transition time). The higher color refresh rates also reduce the lifetime of the color wheel motor.